“Do you think me mad?” So asked the Queen Mother in a letter to her treasurer, Sir Arthur Penn. Queen Elizabeth was on a trip to Caithness in 1952, just a short walk from John O’Groats, when she came across a rundown little castle by the sea. Gale force winds have blown the roof from Barrogill Castle and the 16th-century stately was about to be sold for tuppence. “This seemed so sad that I thought I would buy it & escape there occasionally when life becomes hideous!” the Queen Mother told Penn. “It might be rather fun to have a small house so far away—the air is lovely, and one looks at Orkney from the drawing room!”
Nearly a century later, and the manor—rechristened by Elizabeth with its original name, the Castle of Mey—has passed through the royal family, becoming a staple of King Charles III’s annual holiday in Scotland. The King spent his childhood around the treeless estate of the most northerly castle in Britain, though Princess Margaret preferred to spend her summers in Mustique than “mummy’s draughty castle.” The beloved royal retreat—which offers a bed and breakfast, for any guests wanting to follow in the footprints of the Queen Mother—is currently playing host to Charles, as it does every year before he makes his way to Balmoral. And while the King enjoys his summer getaway, let’s talk you through the history of the Castle of Mey.
A safe haven for the Queen Mother, the castle’s origins are slightly less serene than its royal rebrand. Sometime around the turn of the 1560s, it was built by the 4th Earl of Caithness as a gift for his second son, William Sinclair. In a shocking example of sibling favoritism, the Earl promptly imprisoned his younger son, John, within the walls of the family seat at Girnigoe Castle. On a trip from Mey to Girnigoe, William Sinclair learned that his brother was (perhaps understandably) plotting an escape from his country house incarceration, and ran to tell his father. William (perhaps understandably) was murdered. With its owner otherwise indisposed, the Castle of Mey was taken up by George Sinclair, who named the family the Sinclairs of Mey. In 1789, one of his descendants changed the name of this new family seat to Barrogill Castle – it remained their ownership for a century.
Barrogill underwent significant renovations after the twelfth Earl of Caithness sought the architect William Burn, master of the Scottish Baronial revival, to design a lavish entrance hall and dining room. Around this time, the Earl’s son Alexander built “Lady Fanny’s Seat,” a monument to his chum Charles John Canning, who would go on to become the first Viceroy of India.
After the fifteenth Earl died childless and unmarried, he passed the castle on to F G Heathcote, whose widow then sold the estate to Captain F.B. Imbert-Terry—who would later come across the Queen Mother on one very influential trip to Scotland with Commander and Lady Doris Vyner.
After Elizabeth bought the castle, and promptly restored it to its original name, the Castle of Mey, she would visit her new holiday home when times got “hideous”—or for three weeks every August, around her birthday, and later in October. According to the Express, it was the only home that the Queen Mother owned outright, and she would often while away the hours combing the beach for shells, which she would then arrange on picture frames hanging on the walls – a tray of her shells is still perched by the grand staircase, so the story goes.
